RE: How to fund open access journals from available sources

[Jan Velterop <velterop@biomedcentral.com>]

I fully, fully agree with Joe. The most important attraction of OA is the
unencumbered access and usage regime which offers the possibility of using
papers as 'raw material' for all manner of (meta-)analysis and other
scientific work. It's necessary to do modern science. This cannot be
stressed enough. Universal access is not to be sniffed at, though. For
many it's a major benefit, too. Lower cost is perhaps no more than just a
fortunate side-effect, as a result of getting rid of the monopoly
potential, but must be a great relief for those regularly confronted with
budget cheque-mate.

Jan Velterop

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph J. Esposito [mailto:espositoj@worldnet.att.net]
> Sent: 22 April 2004 21:18
> Subject: Re: How to fund open access journals from available sources
> 
> Would we be talking about Open Access if subscriptions were $5 a year?  
> Well, I sure hope so.  I know for a lot of people the appeal of OA is the
> perceived savings (wrong in my opinion); and for others it is the 
> possibility of broader access (also mostly wrong in my opinion).  The 
> real appeal of OA is that it permits you to do so much more with 
> the text of an article.  OA articles can be seamlessly integrated and 
> aggregated, simultaneously searched, linked to citations and 
> semantically similar texts, and wired into OPACs.  And much more than I 
> can imagine.  OA is one part of the evolution from author-based fixed 
> expression to community-based dynamic expression. We have to begin to 
> conceive of articles not as "papers" but as nodes on a network.  It's 
> time that we all began to stand on the shoulders of giants.
> 
> Joe Esposito